Drassanes Reials: The Royal Shipyards
Why is it significant?
Walk in under the great stone arches and let your eyes travel along the naves: long, parallel halls, open and airy, their wooden roofs carried on rows of pointed arches. It looks like a cathedral with no altar. In fact it was a factory, one of the largest of the medieval world.
Key Facts
| Place | Drassanes Reials: The Royal Shipyards |
|---|---|
| Address | Avinguda de les Drassanes s/n, 08001 Barcelona, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.37550, 2.17610 |
| Part of Walk | La Rambla and El Raval: Barcelona's River of Sand, Opera Bombs and Gaudí's Last Days |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk in under the great stone arches and let your eyes travel along the naves: long, parallel halls, open and airy, their wooden roofs carried on rows of pointed arches. It looks like a cathedral with no altar. In fact it was a factory, one of the largest of the medieval world.
These are the Drassanes Reials, the Royal Shipyards of Barcelona. They were begun in the thirteenth century, when the Crown of Aragon was a great Mediterranean power with its eyes on Sicily, Sardinia, Naples and Greece, and they were enlarged again and again in the following century. Galleys were built here side by side under cover, safe from rain and from spies, and then rolled down to the water, which in those days came almost to the door.
Today the halls hold the Museu Marítim, and their star is a full-size replica of the Real, the royal galley that led the Christian fleet at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, commanded by Don John of Austria. The original was built in these very yards. The replica was made for the four hundredth anniversary of the battle, and it is enormous, gilded and red, with benches for the hundreds of oarsmen who rowed it.
Remember who those rowers were. Most galley oarsmen were convicts, prisoners of war and slaves, chained to the benches, several men to each oar, through heat, storms and battle. The golden carvings at the stern were for the admirals. The benches were for everybody else.
And that brings this walk to its end, where Barcelona has always ended: at the water. You began at a fountain that promises you will return, walked down a dry river bed past convents turned into markets and theatres, through a hospital where a genius died poor, a palace, a cat and a thousand-year-old monastery, to the yards where an empire built its ships. Step outside, and the port and the open sea are waiting just beyond the traffic.